Chimpanzees Perform Better on Computer Tasks When There Is an Audience, Study Finds

When we have an audience, it can affect how well we perform. New research has found that the performance of chimpanzees on challenging computer tasks is influenced by how many humans are watching.

The findings of the study suggest that the “audience effect” existed before reputation-based human societies, a press release from Cell Press said.

“It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless,” said Christen Lin of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, in the press release. “One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences even depending on the difficulty of the task suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected.”

The researchers set out to see if the audience effect — frequently attributed to reputation management in humans — could also occur in a non-human primate.

“Having an audience present, even one of a different species, may be introducing some kind of pressure for the chimpanzees during their task. We hypothesize that the presence of audience members could be causing stress that increases their skill in more difficult situations, or that having more familiar audience members present might cause the chimps to subconsciously perceive the food rewards as higher value, increasing their motivation and thus their performance under more stressful conditions,” Lin told EcoWatch in an email.

The researchers already knew that people are attuned to those watching them, sometimes subconsciously, in ways that can impact their performance. Chimpanzees live in hierarchical societies, but the researchers weren’t sure to what extent they might, like humans, be influenced by having an audience.

“Our study site is special in that chimpanzees frequently interact with and even enjoy the company of humans here, participating almost daily in various touch screen experiments for food rewards,” said Akiho Muramatsu, an assistant professor at Kyoto University, in the press release. “As such, we saw the opportunity to not only explore potential similarities in audience-related effects but also to do so in the context of chimps that share unique bonds with humans.”

The touch screen experimental booth seen from the outside. Chimps and humans can see each other during the experiment. On the human side is an automatic feeder, which rotates to dispense food into a funnel for the chimpanzee. Here we see chimpanzee Ai looking at the photographer. Akiho Muramatsu

Over a period of six years, the researchers analyzed thousands of sessions during which the chimpanzees completed a task on a touch screen.

In three separate number-based tasks, they found that chimpanzees performed increasingly better on the hardest assignment as the number of familiar humans watching them increased. On the other hand, chimpanzees performed worse on the easiest task when they were being watched by a higher number of familiar people, such as the experimenters.

“The chimpanzees may already know that the easier tasks require less focus to do correctly and receive food rewards, and so they could be dedicating less attention to the touch screen tasks during these easier tasks,” Lin told EcoWatch. “Additionally, based on the distraction hypothesis, the types of skills required to perform these tasks are different and may therefore be affected in different ways under pressure. For rigid, rule-based tasks such as the easy tasks in our study, performance is expected to decline under pressure based on this hypothesis.”

Does the result mean that the established relationships chimpanzees had with the humans observing them was a factor in their performance?

“The chimps’ relationship with humans in general may have affected their performance in comparison to wild chimpanzees, for example. However, their relationship with any specific humans in the audience probably would not have affected the results in this study because we have thousands of sessions collected over several years, and different experimenters and people would be present every day,” Lin said.

The research team noted that it was still not clear what particular mechanisms were responsible for the audience-related effects in chimps and humans. They said additional research in non-human apes could provide more insight into why the trait developed and how it evolved.

“Our findings suggest that how much humans care about witnesses and audience members may not be quite so specific to our species,” said Shinya Yamamoto, an associate professor at Kyoto University, in the press release. “These characteristics are a core part of how our societies are largely based on reputation, and if chimpanzees also pay special attention towards audience members while they perform their tasks, it stands to reason that these audience-based characteristics could have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage.”

Lin said the study showed that there are similarities between chimpanzee and human behavior when people are watching.

“This study reveals that chimps can be affected by audiences watching them, much like ourselves. Knowing that chimps also can be impacted by audiences reveals another way that we are more similar to chimpanzees than many people might realize. We can also feel pressure when people are watching us, but just as the chimps did in this study, we can also clutch up and be motivated to perform even better than usual in front of an audience,” Lin told EcoWatch.

How much would chimpanzees be affected by an audience made up entirely of their peers?

“In future studies we would like to test with chimpanzee audiences of various sizes as well, as we were only able to test with human audiences this time. Our results suggest that chimpanzees might be affected by chimpanzee audience members depending on how familiar they are with them, as they were unaffected in performance by unfamiliar human audience members in our study. In terms of chimp social groups, it is clear that chimps have to modify their behavior based on who might be watching them, much like we humans have to in order to maintain our social standings and reputations in our own societies,” Lin added.

The study, “Audience presence influences cognitive task performance in chimpanzees,” was published in the journal iScience.